When you die in a way that surprises or confuses you, the on-death dialog box prevents you from fully working out what actually happened. It is so irritating. This just happened to me again, so I am irritated. Death is often the most important and dramatic moment in a character's life. Permanently hiding the field as soon as it occurs is not appropriate. Usually it's no big deal, but in cases where the player is taken off-guard and wants to look at what happened, it's cruel. I put several hours into my character, and I want to see how it died!

The message log and the character's stats screen are available at this time; that tells you most of what you might need to know. But these don't say where on the field each enemy is, and if you don't happen to exactly remember that, then you might be stuck without full understanding of what happened. For instance, you might not understand how the killer was able to hit you from where it had been standing. Maybe you thought you were protected by walls. Seeing the field would help clear this up.

If the dialog box would just appear to one side, the problem would be mostly (though not completely) solved. That, at least, has got to be a trivial change.

A better solution would be to allow the player to dismiss the dialog box and then maybe bring it back up again by pressing Escape, or something vaguely like that. It'd be ideal if you could inspect creatures on the map exactly as you would be able to do if you character were still alive and still standing on the site of death. I don't need the whole map revealed or anything; just seeing what the character was seeing would be fine. If the character was blind at death, okay THEN I'd be satisfied to see no enemies. That would intuitively feel appropriate. But being arbitrarily blinded by a UI element feels like a slap in the face, when a highly unexpected death occurs.

Allowing click-and-drag movement of the dialog box would help a lot, but I suppose you wouldn't be able to inspect enemies then, though you could at least see their sprites on the map. I want to be able to inspect them. (I know the message log allows this, but sometimes enemies on the map look the same and it isn't obvious which is which, so I want to be able to inspect them via the map too.)

This just happened again. Level 28 madness roguelike, nice strong character. What killed me? I WOULD LIKE TO KNOW TOO

I mean I have a good guess but I'm not sure whether it is geometrically possible. Seeing the center of the map would help confirm or deny my hypothesis. But the dialog box perfectly covers the area I need to see.

The message log isn't enough, as far as I can tell. I need geometric information about character positions. The log only tells you what abilities were used and what their effects were. It helps a lot but it isn't enough, unless I'm missing something--and even if it does somehow tell you WHERE everybody was at the last moment, I guess it would only tell you via coordinates or something, and those would be a hassle to decipher.

This just happened again by the way. I put several hours into a great character and then lost it because a bone giant used Draining Assault on me from a long way off, without rushing out first or anything else like that. As far as I know that is impossible, so I feel cheated. Actually watching it happen would have helped me understand. I mean, ideally I would be able to step back a few turns and watch a replay--that's what's most needed, a replay. That would be AWESOME. But just showing the death at all, instead of locking up my computer for a couple of seconds and then showing a box while the death happens invisibly, would be pretty satisfying.

Okay now I do want replays though... wow how great would that be!

(No I am not asking how the Draining Assault hit; this happens on like a third of my most successful characters, and with a different cause of death every time, so explaining one instance of it accomplishes almost nothing.)

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